My point was that MFC is not a "dumbed down" version of anything. What you are pointing out is merely a name change done by marketing from what the designers called it internally. This was explained in the documentation itself and obvious in the file names and class prefixes used in the library.

Borland's OWL predated MFC (not sure by how many years) and hence held the lead before MFC came along. Once the latter become available there was no longer any compelling reason to stick with Borland and of course their management failed to counter the threat and lost it all.

I myself started with Borland's tools on MS-DOS, moved to Windows with straight Win16/32 SDK programming and then moved to VC++/MFC before moving away from Microsoft platforms to Unix/Linux in the late 90's. It was a highly educational and career-forming experience.